Chapter 7 physical exercises

A healthy mind in a healthy body. This is how an ideal story begins. The real story says that no body is perfectly healthy, so first of all, do a general check-up, several sets of analyses of the whole body so that you can put on paper what is functional and what is non-functional. It is not a mistake, so we say it once again: we put on paper what is functional first and then we put what is not functional.

Regarding the medical system, we must admit that it does a very good job of testing, analyzing the different substances in the body that are markers for certain diseases. Regarding the treatment method, everything changes because here , financial interests appear that are more important than the patient's health.

If your health allows it, then you must do physical exercises every day. It is not an obsessively repeated saying, but a truth. Your body is made up of muscles and ligaments. If they are not used, they atrophy, shrink and in the place where they were, the body replaces them with fat. There is no point in going into all the details, but let's summarize that physical activity is overwhelmingly responsible for the immune system and the metabolic system. This means that if you do not exercise constantly over time you will do less and less, but not by choice instead of helplessness. Separately, the connections of physical activity are self-confidence and self-esteem, as well as positive thinking and the body's energy level. So the following question arises: Do you want to be strong, energetically positive? If your answer is yes, know that you will not like it. It will contain a recipe of patience, perseverance, work and suffering (muscle fever should become something so common that you welcome it with joy and think that it does not make you suffer but strengthens you and makes you stronger)

You will probably say that you do not have time. Of course, this is a lie because part of your daily schedule is chosen by you. Let's go ahead and find time for yourself: in the morning before your chores and obligations begin, allocate an hour to physical activity that you do for yourself and for your health. If you leave for work at 7 and wake up at 6, then subtract an hour. Wake up at 5. Is it such a big effort?

When I talk about physical exercise, I don't mean going to the gym because there is not about physical activity but some physical also socializing and relaxing. I mean physical activity at home and the most useful physical activity is dancing. Why is it the most useful? Because it trains all muscle groups without putting too much pressure on the body. As an energetic state, there are published studies with the benefits of dancing, including well-being, vitality, energy, attitude, reduced anxiety, better management of emotions as a result of increased self-confidence – of course, it comes in time when you repeat and notice that the muscles begin to sculpt beautifully, when you will see that the abdomen is no longer barrel-shaped.

For a rational person, physical activity is mandatory. It is mandatory to be able to think about what you want and to choose rationally and not about the problems of a weakened body that require mental prioritization.

It's not about convincing anyone of the usefulness of training, that's exactly why I recommend you do it at home. Alone. Why at home? Because you can't use the excuse of traveling - I'm not going today because it's too far. Motivation won't be distorted - you do what you do only for yourself and for your health. You don't care about other opinions whether that exercise is better or not, you don't care who says you don't look good or who says you look good.

If you choose dancing as a physical activity, you can choose how you dance, it's your decision. You can choose a playlist with the songs you like the most and just listen to this set every time without anyone complaining that it's boring. You can dress appropriately for dancing, sporty or provocative or why not in pajamas. Or you can give up your clothes and dance naked. It's your choice and it's for you, so the choice belongs to you.

The recommendation for dancing is a universal recommendation. Almost everyone, regardless of age, can practice this type of training. Although it is good don't stop only at dancing but compose a set of exercises for which part of the body you want to develop. To study which muscles are trained in certain movements and thus write your own training. Why do this?

Because only you care about yourself. If you go to an instructor, he will put you in the same group with other students without taking into account that each organism is unique. Better developed in one part, weaker in another and the training recipe must be individual. Of course, he will not have the patience to do this but will show you training sets and tell you: do you want muscles like me? do like me. He will not understand that it is not about muscles but about health. Correlated and yet distinct. Health means much more.

Let's continue. You don't have to think that you've solved everything through training. You have to solve the availability for effort. Man has a very well-developed availability for comfort. Let's give a few examples. If you go to the store to shop, you tend to park as close as possible, right? That's the availability for comfort. Why carry heavy bags such a distance.

Another availability for comfort: you order food from the couch on the phone and have it come to your door. You find your justification that you don't have time to do the shopping and sit for an hour after ordering on a social network waiting for the package. You get to the office and group several colleagues to send someone to bring lunch or order it. All to avoid the activity. All for the availability for comfort. The next step would be to order someone to chew food so that you can avoid the activity of chewing.

There are many examples and I suppose that if you think honestly you can find even more situations in which you chose comfort instead of effort.

Now I hope you understand what you need to work on to achieve the willingness to make an effort. Arm yourself with patience because these are things that don't change overnight, nor are there shortcuts. As I said, it's a long and hard road but sprinkled with real rewards. However, I feel obliged to ask you not to rush your body. Precisely because it doesn't change overnight after years of making decisions in a direction of comfort, rushing will lead to muscle tears or other injuries. So postponing the moment will no longer be a decision but a necessity for you to get well first. Also learn patience well. Set monthly targets, every three months, every 6 months, every year. Never more than a year because it's too far away and you risk falling into the side of despair where it's too hard, it's too far away and you have no way of reaching that target. It's like a 100-story building. If you look at the upper floors they seem difficult if not impossible to reach. If you take each floor one by one to climb to each goal then you achieve something. In time. You realize that no matter how long it takes you have the ability to get there. You take each floor as a goal and always just one floor until you gain confidence in yourself that if you take it step by step you will get far.

Let's make a correlation of physical activity with the transformation of the foods you eat. During your activities, your workouts you consume energy. Your own energy produced by the body as a result of the transformation of the ingested macronutrients. Like any organism you are adaptable and oriented towards comfort. This means that after you have completed a set of activities that require from you, the body will establish new rules. If the activity was demanding then the energy level will increase, muscle capacity will increase, blood flow will improve and many more. If you repeat the activity it will maintain these new rules and if you stop and do not repeat it it will restrict the rules. Constant activity will force the body to become stronger so that the discomfort of the activity decreases. As a rule, it takes between 6 and 9 months of sustained and fairly intense activity 5 days a week and the variable duration of 1-2 hours of training.

After this period, the level of exercise decreases from demanding to acceptable and this is a signal that you have become stronger. That is when you need to add something to your training to make it demanding again - demanding actually means that it asks you to develop to become stronger. Here the rule applies - if the path you are on is too easy, it means that you are on the wrong path.

Physical development is accompanied by energy development. The charging / discharging cycles become more intense and so you will store, generate and use more energy. Energy is pleasant and can have various uses.

Consider what perseverance is. As I said, 6 months do not pass so easily. But 6 months in which you have pain, suffer and feel how your whole body changes will be even longer. Here too, there are several methods of approaching the overall picture. The first would be to analyze the rules only at a larger interval. Miracles will not happen overnight, but in 30 days, let's say, you will see some changes. If you look at it day after day, you will not notice any improvement.

In order for the overall picture to remain unchanged, I offer you an important piece of advice – take a break when your body asks for it. The break is useful for recovery and it is an internal report that you receive. If you ignore the break requested by your body, you can force yourself too much and need a general stop to heal. So it is better to take a break and let the overall picture stay in place for a day than to take a forced break for a few weeks due to a injurie.

Another method that you should consider refers to mental construction. You must realize that you are only doing this for yourself. You must realize that it does not matter what any other person says about you, about your training. Because they will say it. You can be sure of it. They will say it out of hatred and envy. They don't actually hate you, they hate themselves. You become their example because you do something for yourself and put in effort and they are not able to do that. Because they see you putting in the effort to become better and they are not able to do that. That's why they will try to discourage you. If you succeed and maintain your direction and become better and stronger, they will be forced to follow in your footsteps. They may even ask you for advice. That's the moment when after all the bad things they actually recognize themselves as beginners in relation to the new you.

This is the mental construction that you have to build: patience, perseverance and awareness in choosing and respecting the chosen path.

Let's go back a little to what the training consists of. I recommend anything that involves movement, but it starts with what the joints involve. For joints, we have the ankle, knee, hip, shoulders, elbows, wrist, neck, fingers, jaw. Rotations or stretches or any other element that helps the joint. Done repetitively but without pressure or weights. Strictly to work the joint. I assume you did a neck rotation and it cracked. That's what you're trying to clean, to repair. If you do 30 neck rotations a day, it will crack for 2 years. After that, it will move as if it were greased. You'll see over time the benefits become more and more visible. I can't help but draw attention to the complexity of the human body. It does miraculous things if you ask it. You have to show it what you need. You have to show it that you need joints to do the training. How do you show it? Through pain. Only when it hurts the body will take action. Then it will strengthen and repair the painful point so that in the future it will be stronger. The more constant the pain is, the longer it will work to achieve the above objective. You choose this objective when you choose what activity you want to do.

If you think that you can't do something, maybe you should take the example of a woman who carries a pregnancy for 9 months. In these 9 months, maybe it would be good to read and understand what incredible changes she can achieve. Then maybe you will understand that your adaptation efforts will be crowned with success because the limit of your body is very high. Also, recovery is incredible, you can take the same example of the woman who after giving birth resumes all her activities in a few months. We are people regardless of whether we are men or women, so the ability to adapt is similar. You just have to choose to want and follow your path.

After the joints, you can start with the muscles, but it would be useful to always see the goal. You don't need to lift 20 kilograms at once. For muscles to grow, you need to lift 1 kilogram 20 times to achieve an effortless and quality muscle fiber. Repetition instead of forcing also helps minimize the risk of injuries.

Go ahead and choose complex physical activities in which, along with movement, you also use your mind to find strategies and the body must apply them. Sports are one of these types of activity with different benefits depending on the part of the body trained more but having one thing in common: the unification of mind and body in conscious and total action. Perhaps it is the most important thing to achieve.